From black hole entropy to energy-minimizing states in QFT

Behind certain marginally trapped surfaces one can construct a geometry containing an extremal surface of equal, but not larger area. This construction underlies the Engelhardt-Wall proposal for explaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a coarse-grained entropy. The construction can be proven to...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. D 2020-02, Vol.101 (4), p.1, Article 046001
Main Authors: Bousso, Raphael, Chandrasekaran, Venkatesa, Shahbazi-Moghaddam, Arvin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Black holes
Entropy
Field theory
gauge-gravity dualities
Granulation
Half spaces
Quantum field theory
Quantum theory
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Behind certain marginally trapped surfaces one can construct a geometry containing an extremal surface of equal, but not larger area. This construction underlies the Engelhardt-Wall proposal for explaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a coarse-grained entropy. The construction can be proven to exist classically but fails if the null energy condition is violated. Here we extend the coarse-graining construction to semiclassical gravity. Its validity is conjectural, but we are able to extract an interesting nongravitational limit. Our proposal implies Wall's ant conjecture on the minimum energy of a completion of a quantum field theory state on a half-space. It further constrains the properties of the minimum energy state; for example, the minimum completion energy must be localized as a shock at the cut. We verify that the predicted properties hold in a recent explicit construction of Ceyhan and Faulkner, which proves our conjecture in the nongravitational limit.
ISSN:2470-0010
2470-0029
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.101.046001